Journey to the Center of the Earth

I usually get irritated when people give up on a film after less than a handful of minutes. Many a film will take a while to cook and a lot of hidden gems have been missed because people gave up on them too early.

It could well be that 'Journey...' will be that film for me. It was awful and I gave in after about ten minutes. And that includes time for the credits.

The camera work was poor, the acting was like a school play and the dialogue made day time soaps seem like Shakespeare.

I know actors have to pay bills, but they should at least do a decent day's work.

Fortunately I rented this, so it didn't hurt the bank too much and I got to hand it back.

AVOID !!!!

Oh. My. Gosh. This is one embarrassment of a movie. The dialog, the acting, the special effects and props. Bad bad bad.

I would love to know the back story about getting it released. What were they thinking? Maybe someone needed a tax write off. I can't imagine any other reason that it made it past two days of production, and certainly not to release..

When I saw them using a vegetable steamer as a prop radio antenna, I was so amused I added another star, just for the hilarious factor. Oh, and this movie subscribes to the theory that glasses mean you are SMART (even if they are prop glasses with no corrections).

Be sure to read the reviews, which are much more entertaining than the movie. Maybe watch this with friends and do your own Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing. A few margaritas won't hurt. Steam some veggies.

Even below the typical level of Sci-Fi channel stuff. Most of these movies you can laugh at, but this thing barely achieves even camp-level status. It has next to nothing to do with the Jules Verne work, only rips off and defames the title. In fact, everything in this movie is ripped off from somebody else's ideas.

The $7 budget used in this film was only enough to hire some Drama 101 students from a local middle-school. A rag-tag group of Xena-wanna-be's are supposed to go to Germany in a covert mission, using some sort of teleportation device. Would you believe it doesn't work right? Well, they don't materialize inside of solid rock like this movie's writers did; instead, they end up in a south Pacific tropical island paradise. It's the home to a few CGI dinosaurs that actually appear occasionally, usually to roar. There's other Skull island type grotesque creatures scaring our heroines, too.

The group of stereotypes--I mean soldiers include Vilma Dinkley. She examines a pebble, and immediately knows they're 600 kilometers below the surface, under magma. You heard that right: under magma. There's a bully cat-fighter girl, a Barbie cutout doll, and their Camp Fire girls troop leader--I mean, captain. They all look like refugees from an Annette and Frankie beach musical. Scenes involving the tunneling vehicle are even sillier. The scientist and the army guy ride around through magma like they do it every day, making one-liners. The machine emerges from a magma chamber into the Hawaiian set, and shows no signs of even being warm. No smoke, ash, discoloration--nothing.

If somebody sells the DVD of this at a yard sale for 25 cents, it's price gouging.

Some reviewers felt this mess was fun. Jeez. Their taste is in their mouth. This bore about boring to the center of the earth must have had Jules Verne spinning wildly in his grave. I found it at Wal-Mart and would love to get my $5 back. It is doubled with 100 Million BC, also with Greg Evigan. I enjoyed some of the '50s-60s schlock. They were fun. This was a ripoff. Less than 5 minutes of looking at a sick dinosaur with vocal cords, and a few minutes of a spider with gland problems, both phonier than Ma Bell. One more thing, the music was an outright steal from Phillip Glass. Action? None. It was talk-talk-talk, and stupid talk-talk-talk at that. The picture on the box has this really mean looking dinosaur. Evidently, he was cut out of the movie. Fred Flintstone's Dino was far more convincing. It is advertised as a Maximum Movie Experience. They should be sued for false advertising. The girls were good looking and a couple of them could be classified as actresses. Appearing in this piece of junk is no way to further a career. Does Michelle have any words of advice for her sister --- like----keep away from this tripe? You get the picture. Don't get this picture.

I don't usually post... but had to on this one. I'm guessing the marketing pitch went something like this, "Okay... we release this piece of roughly cobbled together footage from the cut-room floor from an old sci-fi flick that was killed for good reason 20 years ago at the exact same time as Brenden Frazier's 'Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D', call it by the exact same name and hope nobody notices. Who wants in?!" My wife kept jokingly asking, "Is this a 'Sweded' version of a 'real' movie?" (see "Be Kind, Rewind" for concept of "Sweding"). Honestly. An all female combat unit who is neither on a combat mission nor behave like soldiers. Poor whip-cams and badly edited cut scenes. Special "ship effects" that have repeat-cells (remember Scooby-Doo cartoons? Remember how the background kept "repeating" when the gang would run down a hallway). Horrific dialogue, audio mixing (it was like watching old Kung-Fu movies... lip flaps don't match the dialogue... crap, the Japanese Anime we watch does a better job than THIS movie did!), acting, direction, photography...honestly, the only thing even remotely redeeming was the lame attempt to give Homage to Aliens (pirated dialogue "Hey... you look just like i feel...", an easily identifiable "Hudson", and even a gratuitous "chest bursting" concept), which would have been mildly funny if it wasn't attempting to take itself seriously.